This post was originally sent to my email subscribers on November 1, 2024. It is being reposted here to create a more easily searchable archive.

Hello my owl friends! I hope everyone has had a lovely Halloween. I wish I’d had some kind of horror game to tell you about this month, but I cannot stress enough how much horror is not my wheelhouse (you want my brother for that!). Although, perhaps there’s a different kind of horror I’ve covered…

The Price of Coal

Okay, I won’t tease it anymore – the PDF and print-on-demand versions of The Price of Coal are available TODAY! This marks the first time this game has been available in these formats – the initial print run had sold out (and was becoming hard to find even at the handful of retailers who had gotten multiple copies), and our initial “digital” offering was the Roll20 module (which I still think is pretty snazzy, and you should check it out if you use Roll20).

But the VTT solution isn’t for everyone, and I have worried a lot about letting the game go out of print. After all, it is the work that I am most proud of in my career, and certainly the most important thing I’ve worked on to date, and it was really important to me that it continues to be available in some form, even if it’s not quite the same as the original print run.

The PDF is full-color and contains the full art, in contrast to the text-only edition I put out earlier this year. I did consider the possibility of doing something a bit simpler to make it so you could print your own version at home, but honestly, sacrificing any of Jaqueline’s art or Miguel’s layout was just not a good choice, to me. Their work helps make the game what it is. So the PDF is uncompromised! It’s beautiful and I hope people enjoy having the game available in this format without needing a full VTT to use it.

The print-on-demand version is also available now, for those who still want a physical copy of the game where there are none to be had. This is a little different from the original print run – Lightning Source uses a slightly different cardstock than our original printer, and due to economies of scale, this version does not come with a nice box like the original version. I had originally been reluctant to compromise the really nice total package of the first print run, but this is VASTLY preferable to the game not being available anywhere! 

It’s been over three years since the Kickstarter, and I’m really pleased that the game is still finding an audience. It means the world to me, and I hope you’ll check it out!

Making Card Games

Speaking of those economies of scale, I keep trying to wean myself off of making card-based games. I really like card-based games – I like playing them, I like designing them – but the economics on them just aren’t good. You’re more limited in your choice of printers, and they’re more expensive to produce than a book, even though people are generally willing to pay less for them than a book.

I told myself I wasn’t going to care about things like that when I stepped back to doing this purely as a hobby and not as a business! But I look at the numbers and they rankle me! It’s rankling! So every time I write down a new idea in my notebook, and I think “this probably needs cards…”, I end up trying to list out alternatives I could use, in order to package and format the game as a book, rather than cards. There are ways to do this (like instructing someone to use a standard deck of poker cards, and including a table in the book that cross-references the card suits and values with whatever you WOULD have printed on a card) and I hate all of them.

And then I end up making it a card game anyway, grumbling the whole time, and accepting that I will make even less money on it than I would if I was smart about it. Because at the end of the day, I do value the artistry of it and the elegance of the design over the economics, and if I think I can’t achieve the same effect without cards, then by god, it’s going to be cards.

But I also think a lot about my design peers who are not doing this as a hobby, and who do have to give more weight to the economic concerns of these things. It seems like it’s been a down month for sales and for crowdfunding campaigns, as far as I have been able to see (obviously this is anecdotal, because actual fiscal data in RPGs is vanishingly rare). It’s never been easy to actually make money in roleplaying games, or at least more than just barely enough to get the game made. We’re over-reliant on crowdfunding, we struggle to penetrate new markets, and some portion of the audience will fight back against any attempt to interest them in any game other than the single biggest one out there.

These are not new complaints, obviously. But they’re ones I generally kind of insulate myself from by stepping out of the “professional” side of the space where I can. I recognize that I have done this as a kind of… well, Isaiah Berlin would call it big-R Romantic sour grapes. The king confiscates my lands? Lands are not worth having and we should embrace humble lives. I live in a backwards pietist land while our sparkling cultural neighbors make way for the Enlightenment? The Enlightenment was a false pursuit anyway and their science has nothing on our close communion with God. The economic conditions preclude me from finding the kind of artistic success that would allow me to pursue it full time? A full-time artistic career is not worth pursuing (to me) because it grants me the freedom to place the finances of producing a game as less important than the artistic integrity of the vision.

All this to say: every time I start a new card-based game, I write down a little note like “nooooo, not cards, don’t do this again” and then I do it again. (And shoutout to Alex White, for asking the question on bluesky that originally prompted this train of thought; here’s his blog post about it!)

Metatopia Preparations

This newsletter is taking a slightly different format than the previous ones because I am still in the middle of getting ready for Metatopia, which is next week! I have scheduled two sessions of Before the Season Ends, and one of The Diplomacy of Queens. Ideally, if things go well, I’ll be able to put up a playtest version of Before the Season Ends in the weeks after Metatopia. I like doing this when I can, like I did for Dollhouse Drama, because other people’s feedback during that stage is so valuable.

One of my tasks to get this game ready to playtest was to do a little arts-and-crafts project making the tokens for it. The game uses an economy of tokens to represent the kinds of actions you can take (using flower language, to match the Regency theme, naturally), and I could have just cut them out on cardstock and made that work, but I didn’t feel like that would be as satisfying. So I broke out the mod podge and put them on some wooden discs from the craft store, to have something a little more solid. 

I think I’ve touched on this topic before, but this is really the third version of Before the Season Ends, this token economy version. The two previous ones got fairly deep into design before I realized that they didn’t do what I wanted them to do and – probably even more importantly – that I wouldn’t enjoy playing them. So those are scrapped (well, condemned to an “archive” folder in my google drive, I never delete anything), and I’m really hoping that the third time’s the charm with this one. 

Meanwhile, The Diplomacy of Queens will have quite a long road to go, regardless of how well the Metatopia test does. Since this game has much more involved character creation than anything I’ve done before, I actually really only have the character creation rules ready, and the session is just going to focus on that process. Because this is another historical game, there’s a lot of information to impart through character creation (fun fact: this is part of why there IS no character creation in The Price of Coal, I just give you pre-made characters to play with).

The thing I really want to look at, though, is some of the intentional friction I’m trying to introduce into the process by controlling what you can CHOOSE for your character and what is determined at random. So you’re making your character, who is a medieval noblewoman, and you can choose certain things about yourself and your home lands. But it’s also a diplomacy game, and your power mostly comes from your husband (and your father), who you did not get to choose. You can choose how you behave, but you can’t control the fact that your husband spent your dowry on pursuing a war everyone told him he’d lose, or that he spends more time with his mistresses than with you, or that he’s inadvertently encouraged an insurgent heretic movement in your country.

So, that’s the goal for that session, and writing up the possible combinations of character components (yourself, your home land, your husband, and his land) has been more intensive than I thought it would be, and has taken a lot longer than I thought it would. My intent for the full game is to have 16 of each, but I’ll only have 8 of each ready for Metatopia, which should still be plenty to test with.

I don’t know if others are better at this, but I’ve realized that I’m terrible at estimating how long certain tasks will take me – I thought the Diplomacy of Queens character creation would be fast and easy, but it’s taken weeks. Meanwhile, I thought putting together all the quest cards for Gryphons and Gargoyles would take ages, and it took… maybe four hours, all told. 

Bits & Pieces

On these rare occasions (like the weeks before a con) where I have actual design deadlines and an actual specific set of work that needs to get done, I really have to fight the impulse to ignore the thing I’m supposed to work on in favor of some shiny new idea. It doesn’t even matter which shiny new idea; there’s always something shinier and newer than the thing I’m working on.

I end up taking a very bits-and-pieces approach to the work, where I split the writing up into chunks and tell myself that if I get some number of chunks done in a writing session, then I can go haring off after whatever new idea I want to brainstorm on. Except I always have multiple games in progress at once, so I end up with writing sessions this month where I wrote 1 out of 16 Diplomacy of Queens character sheets, 1 out of 36 Dollhouse Drama playsets, 3 out of 42 Gryphons and Gargoyles quests, and then scribbled out a couple pages of notes on whatever captivating new thing struck my fancy.

Which means it’s very easy to fall into a pattern where I logically know that I’m making progress, but I don’t feel like it. I think my approach of having lots of projects in flight at any given time already makes me prone to this (it is part of why things take me years to finish, I know this). But I can’t really envision myself sitting down to tackle one project through to completion (or at least to design completion and writing completion), and not working on something else when I get stuck, or feel inspiration strike.

I struggle sometimes with how long it takes me to finish games, because it always FEELS like my peers are getting things done so much faster than me – even when that really isn’t true. There’s so many things that I’m working on and that I want to share with people! And I just have to remind myself that making small regular increments of progress will get me there eventually, and that it doesn’t burn me out, unlike trying to do everything at once in a big blaze of productive glory.

Closing Notes

As my one big recommendation this month, I have one that I was actually really skeptical about when I first heard about it: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s new concept album based on 1979 cult classic The Warriors. I will fully admit that I did not think this was a good pairing – so much of the movie’s beauty to me is in the physicality of the performances, there’s so much conveyed without dialogue (I actually initially thought it might work well as a kind of ballet, like the Billy Joel jukebox musical Movin’ Out!). And love him or hate him, Miranda is a wordy guy. But the concept album came out last week, and it blew me away. I ate my words. I’ve listened to it basically every day since. It’s really really good. So check that out!

That’s all for this month, folks, and hopefully next month I’ll be able to bring you good news about my Metatopia playtests! I’ll try to share my process for collating playtest feedback and consolidating it into action items! Don’t forget to let people know about the new print-on-demand version of The Price of Coal!